I had been curious about Elixir for some time. After all, the promise of having the best of Erlang with a more palatable syntax was very attractive indeed.

A couple of days ago I finally finished a small project in Elixir using the Phoenix web framework, which is a sort of “Elixir on Rails”. These are my first impressions of both Elixir as a language and Phoenix as a framework. Take all this with a grain of salt: most of it is pretty subjective, and it’s from the perspective of a total Elixir/Erlang noob.

Elixir

I used Introducing Elixir for learning, which turned out to be a bad choice because it can feel like an intro to functional programming using Elixir, not so much an in-depth book about Elixir for someone who knows functional programming. In fact, the book preface says:

If you’re already familiar with functional languages, you may find the pacing of this gentle introduction hopelessly slow. Definitely feel welcome to jump to another book or online documentation that moves faster if you get bored.

Elixir is a bit of a mindfuck for me in that it looks like Ruby, but it’s not object-oriented at all. The language also seems to value convenience a bit too much for my taste (sacrificing simplicity or consistency). In particular, I find the extra, convenience syntax for symbols in maps extremely annoying:

I seem to recall this has something to do with macros, but all that syntax sugar feels weird. And all those colons, sometimes before, sometimes after a word, look ugly and confusing to me.

I have other, smaller peeves, but they’re subjective or unimportant. However, they strengthened the impression that I didn’t like the syntax.

In conclusion, the syntax reminded me of ES2015: syntax and exceptions for convenience, which makes it feel inconsistent, complex, and hard to remember. It constantly reminded me of the fat arrow function in ES2015.

Phoenix

Phoenix came with its own, related mindfuck: it looks like Rails and often feels like it, but there aren’t classes. That confused me a couple of times, but I guess it’s just a matter of getting used to it.

I think I liked it generally, and it felt productive, but I also felt that there was too much magic and generated code. Not as bad as with how I remember Rails (from many years ago), but enough to make me feel uncomfortable. Also, take into account that my project was a perfect fit for the framework: a small, mostly CRUD application.

I did get to try both tasks and channels, which were really cool, for example with the automatic reconnect in channels (they are implemented using WebSockets) without having to write any special code.

Conclusions

It was interesting to learn Elixir, but I’m curious about Erlang now. As in, I like the concepts behind Elixir (which are mostly Erlang concepts) and I’m not in love with Elixir’s syntax, so if I had to build a system that needed that kind of scalability and reliability I would consider Erlang.